Architectural correspondence, architectural misting, and innovation: New perspectives

• Author: Nicholas O'Regan,David Sarpong,Nicholas Burton
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2305

OVERVIEW ARTICLE

Architectural correspondence, architectural misting, and

innovation: New perspectives

Nicholas Burton

1

| David Sarpong

2

| Nicholas O'Regan

3

1

Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK

2

Brunel University, London, UK

3

Aston University, Birmingham, UK

Correspondence

Nicholas Burton, Northumbria University, City

Campus East 1, Newcastle, UK NE1 8ST.

Email: n.burton@northumbria.ac.uk

Abstract

The relationship between innovation, product design, and industry co-evolution

remains under-theorized. This article discusses gaps in knowledge and introduces the

contributing papers in this special issue.

1|INTRODUCTION

The degree to which efficiency benefits are available to firms who

choose to correspond product and organization architectures has

intrigued management scholars for around half-a-century. The idea

that products design organizations, or organizations design products,

termed the mirroring hypothesis by Colfer (2007) and Colfer and

Baldwin (2016) can be traced back through various literatures to the

ideas of decomposable systems (Simon, 1962), information-hiding

(Parnas, 1972), communication structures (Conway, 1968), and modu-

larity theory (Henderson & Clark, 1990; Sanchez & Mahoney, 1996).

Although Henderson and Clark (1990) and Sanchez and Mahoney

(1996) never referred explicitly to a “mirroring hypothesis”, their semi-

nal papers in Administrative Science Quarterly and Strategic Manage-

ment Journal respectively were perhaps the first to lay claim to the

idea that innovation/product design acts as a schematic for organiza-

tion design. Henderson and Clark (1990), for example, recognized that

mirroring can arise as “knowledge and information processing struc-

ture come to mirror the internal structure of the product they

are designing”(p. 27). Sanchez and Mahoney (1996) noted that

“…although organizations ostensibly design products, it can also be

argued that products design organizations, because the coordination

tasks implicit in specific product designs largely determine the feasible

organization designs for developing and producing those products”

(p. 64). Scholarship on mirroring has grown substantially since Langlois

and Robertson's (1992) study of the microcomputer and stereo sys-

tems industries, with a significant and growing number of studies pub-

lished that examine the extent to which groups of modular

(specialized) organizations produce modular products and vertically

integrated firms produce integrated products (e.g., Burton & Galvin,

2018a; Cabigiosu & Camuffo, 2012; Colfer & Baldwin, 2016; Funk,

2008; Galvin & Morkel, 2001; Hoetker, 2006; MacCormack,

Baldwin, & Rusnak, 2012).

The mirroring hypothesis holds when the structure of an organi-

zation mirrors its technical product (e.g., Colfer & Baldwin, 2016).

Complementing this formal idea, recently scholars have suggested a

“reverse mirroring hypothesis”(Campagnolo & Camuffo, 2010;

MacDuffie, 2013; Sanchez, Galvin, & Bach, 2013) whereby “organiza-

tions design products”, an extension of Conway's (1968) Law, “organi-

zations which design systems are constrained to produce designs

which are copies of [their] communication structures.”(p. 31). The

general idea of the mirroring hypothesis then is that a product system

can be divided into various sub-systems, components, sub-compo-

nents, and so on (Burton & Galvin, 2018b; Sorkun & Furlan, 2017). To

the same extent, an organizational system can also be divided into

strategic business units, programmes, projects and specialized teams,

and an industry structure can disaggregate into a number of special-

ized firms along an industry value chain as a network of “modular

organizations”who coalesce around a particular product design

(Sanchez & Mahoney, 1996; Schilling & Steensma, 2001).

The mirroring hypothesis seeks to examine the presence or

absence of two bi-directional relationships. First, the correspondence

between the product system and firm architecture—a“within-firm

mirroring”, and, second, between these architectural choices and the

prevailing industry architecture—an “across-firm mirroring”(Burton &

Galvin, 2018a; Colfer, 2007; Colfer & Baldwin, 2016). Scholars in the

modularity tradition haveargued that an across-firm mirroring hypoth-

esis holds when either a vertically integrated firm develops an inte-

grated product or a group of specialized organizations along an

industry value chain develops modular products. Langlois and Robert-

son (1992) implicitly recognized this potential correspondence

between modular product designs and industry structure by observing

JEL classification codes: L14, L15, O32, O33.

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2305

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